In the July issue of C&RL, Thomas Nisonger & Charles Davis have a paper titled “The Perception of Library and Information Science Journals by LIS Education Deans and ARL Library Directors: A Replication of the Kohl-Davis Study.” This is, well, a replication of the 1985 Kohl-Davis study, which ranked LIS journals based on the perceptions of LIS school deans and research library directors. Mostly because I was just curious (and because I’m hung up on IF lately — must be my upcoming 3rd year review), I decided to compare Nisonger & Davis’ findings with the latest IF rankings. Conveniently, both are based on 2003 data. So I created this table, comparing the latest IFs (which you can download from Web of Science) & the K-D results (but only the data from deans, since that’s what I personally care about). I only have the top 20 rankings here, though IF goes to 55 & K-D goes to 71.
| Rank | IF | K-D |
| 1 | ARIST | JASIST / LQ |
| 2 | MIS Quarterly | |
| 3 | J Amer Medical Informatics Ass’n | ARIST / LISR |
| 4 | Info Syst Res | |
| 5 | Info Manag – Amsterdam | JDoc |
| 6 | JDoc | Library Trends |
| 7 | JASIST | JAL / IP&M |
| 8 | C&RL | |
| 9 | Scientometrics | ASIST Proceedings |
| 10 | J Manage Info Syst | RUSQ |
| 11 | IP&M | C&RL |
| 12 | J Info Sci | JELIS |
| 13 | Int J Geogr Inf Sci | Libraries & Culture |
| 14 | J Health Commun | J of the Medical Library Association |
| 15 | Lib Resources & Tech Svcs | Lib Resources & Tech Svcs |
| 16 | Gov Info Q | School Library Media Research |
| 17 | Int J Info Manage | J Info Sci / Libri |
| 18 | Telecommun. Policy | |
| 19 | Libr Inform Sci | J Amer Medical Informatics Ass’n |
| 20 | LISR | School Library Journal |
Interesting that in the top 10, only 3 appear on both lists, and only 9 appear in both top 20s.
Bollen et al. have an article in the December 2005 issue of IP&M (don’t even ask me how that’s out yet) titled “Toward alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation data.” In it they propose this taxonomy of impact measures:
The first dimension corresponds to whether an impact measure is based on frequency-based metrics as opposed to structural metrics. The second dimension concerns whether a measure is based on author- or reader-defined data sets.
Clearly the K-D study measures reader-defined ranking. But it seems to me that the X-axis really needs 3 points (thus making it a plane, not an axis, yes, I know): frequency-based, structural, & perceptual metrics.